Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Father Killed, Throat Slit, Disemboweled - Son Says "Aliens Harvested His Organs"

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

Victor Contreras Sr. talked to his son, Victor Contreras Jr., and told him his younger brother, Jaime,  was "acting crazy again". After not be able to reach his father for a few days,  Victor Contreras Jr., went to the house to check on his 74-year-old father and says he smelled a foul odor coming from an open window. What happened next is the stuff of nightmares. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss what happened inside the house, what the evidence says, and the story being told by Jaime Contreras, the only suspect in the murder of his father.           Transcribe Highlights 00:00.62 Introduction 01:20.85 Alien life form took over Dad 03:01.55 Discussion of the bowel 07:07.69 Special scissors in the morgue 10:18.70 Defining unattended death 14:59.66 Body is severely traumatized, flies show up 19:27.46 Any gash, slit, stab wound, etc...increase rate of decomp 24:56.30 Prior attack 30:25.80 Blood spatter, breaking down the terms 35:06.04 Explaining arterial spray 40:07.16 Does he really believe what he claims? 45:24.68 Mental illness 50:17.96 Chain of command on site 52:14.69  Conclusion  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. Back in the 90s, I used to be a fan of the program Exiles. There'd never been anything like it on television. I was kind of fascinated by it. It was interesting. It truly was. Never understood how a port-certified forensic pathologist

became an FBI agent. That never made sense to me. And she would conduct her own autopsies. But that aside, Hollywood, you know. Now, you know Now You know Those things that we thought were Quite Fantastic back then

With a show like The X-Files Seemed to be getting into Our I don't know Our common conversations now Regarding things like Extraterrestrial life You know, our common conversations now regarding things like extraterrestrial life and, you know, these people seeing things on radar, former Navy fighter pilots seeing the infamous Tic Tacs, if you've seen any of that stuff.

And I've gotten kind of numb to it now. But what happens if an individual believes that some extraterrestrial life form has inhabited the body of a member of his family? And not just any member of his family. His father. And in order to protect himself from said extraterrestrial life inhabiting his father's body, he thinks it's a good idea to probably kill him. Coming to you from the beautiful campus

of Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama, I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, so you're saying that you, the authorities, have this young man has harvested his his father's organs. I want to know what organs, you know, what precisely was harvested, harvested. And then they're also using the term disembowelment, which is something that— What does that actually mean, Joe? I mean, I can imagine what I think it means, but what does disembowelment really mean? Yeah, most of the time with disembowelment, it's not removal of the large and small intestine. Because when they say bowel, that's what they're referring to. And as a matter of fact, you know, when you talk to physicians, surgeons in particular,

and pathologists, when you're doing autopsies, they'll say, you know, we need to take a look at small bowel. They're not going to say small intestines, small bowel, large bowel. Um, and it's, uh, you know, out of all, all of the organ systems that I dealt with in autopsy suite, um, that was probably the most unpleasant. And, and certainly if you nick it, you're going to have, and an eruption or presentation of smell in the autopsy room that is very offensive. And I'm saying, and this is a different kind of smell that you have with, you know, with decomposition. It makes the entire room smell like a bowel movement, and it doesn't dissipate because the body is laying there, laid bare before you. So with disembowelment, we can look back in history. There have actually been, you know,

cases where disembowelment was used as a means of death, either self-inflicted or when you have the authorities that have sanctioned some type of capital punishment. You know, one of the things that comes to mind is that scene from Braveheart that with Mel Gibson, where they have him strapped to the table at the end of the movie. I don't want to, if no one's seen Braveheart by this point, I don't think I'm going to give a spoiler here. But, you know, one of the things that they say is they use a hook and the hook looks a lot like a gutting knife that that you see today that people use with deer it's kind of a it actually does have a hooked shape the inner portion of the blade is very very sharp and you run it up the midline and the bowels fall out okay there's that famous scene from um let's see what was it was it uh the red Dragon or was it Hannibal? I can't remember. One of the Silence of the Lambs movies and Anthony Hopkins character actually says to the Italian he disemboweled him and his bowels are hanging out.

And there's a lot of references to this type of punishment that you can see in art going back years and years. I think there's even a character. I can't remember which character or one person in the Bible that they refer. Was it Judas? I can't remember. It was Judas that exploded in. Yeah, yeah, his bowels erupted and that sort of thing. And now I'm talking about two different

things here relative to the disembowelment of somebody and then trying to have our friends understand that the bowel is something that even in the morgue it's not the most pleasant thing. It's not like taking a heart out or taking lungs out. And here's a little inside baseball for you as well. One of the things I worked with a pathologist for years, and when small bowel was removed, he would have me run what they call run the bowel. And so you start and small intestine is long.

It's long. You hear all kinds of figures that are thrown out. Don't believe what you hear, but it is rather robust in length. at one end, essentially where the stomach dumps into the small intestine, and you clip it off where it dumps into the large intestine, and you take a pair of scissors. And there's actually scissors that we have in a mortar called bowel scissors, and they've got kind of a, looks like the bottom half of a duck bill on one side, on the bottom portion. And then it's, that duck bill turns into a very sharp edge. It's a pair of scissors. And then you have a regular, the top aspect is a regular presentation of scissors. And then you just kind of

pull the bowel over the surface of the scissors and the bowel actually opens. And the reason we do that in the morgue is to check for any kind of pathology that might be existing in the bowel. Now, it's painstaking, takes a while. You have to wash and clean the bowel. And of course, it's a foul undertaking, you know, as you can imagine. And then you get into the large intestine, which is much shorter, easy to manage. It gets really, really nasty to get into that. And again, you know, we have to explore these areas. If you're going to actually do an autopsy and say that you've done a full autopsy. That's part and parcel of what you have to do.

However, in our case today, I don't think that that was the purpose of what the son was setting out to do here. I don't think he was looking for any kind of indwelling disease that his dad might have had. He's according to what we're understanding from the police, he was there to search for alien life that indwelled his father. Brother Dave, you know, when the police initially rolled up on this case, and by the way, this is in El Paso, Texas. When they rolled up on this case, they were summoned to the home. And I find this wording fascinating. They rolled up at the house regarding a quote unquote unattended death. And what that generally means when you hear unattended is somebody may have peacefully passed away in their sleep.

We use the term unattended in medical legal circles by saying that no one was physically there when they died. Okay. And any unattended death in the departments that I work for, you had to, you had to make an appearance at the scene because there are some, some deaths that occur. You have people that are gravely ill and, um, and they, they pass on, well, was that death attended or unattended? And our, you know, the last shop that I was at, you know, our rule of thumb was, was that I don't care if there was somebody living upstairs and this person died on the first floor and the other person lives on the second floor. If they pass away without somebody witnessing, that's an unattended death. So we would go out and at least do an examination. But can you imagine, can you imagine when these officers from El Paso rolled up at the scene?

I can guarantee you, I can, dollars to donuts, I guarantee you that when these folks clocked in that morning, this is the last thing they expected to see that day. Well, you know, when you started off talking about aliens and things like that, almost, almost unbuttoning the shirt, you know, a little early, because as we look at this case, you have a father, 74 years old, and he's dead. In the days preceding his death, he's calling one of his sons and saying, hey, your brother, Jamie, is acting crazy again. I'm putting that in air quotes, acting crazy again, again. Got to add that to this. He's acting crazy again. That means that within their nuclear family, that tight little family circle, father and two sons, at least, they're more than aware that Jamie is not balanced.

And he has done this before. And based on what happened, I'm going to say he's been violent before. Now, if Jamie has been violent before and has been acting crazy before, did he blame those pastimes on aliens or did he have some other thing to blame it on? In this case, we've got Victor Contreras goes to the house to check on his 74 year old father. And before he can make entry into the home, he smells rotting flesh. He smells death. You've explained this before, Joe, and have talked about the smells that people incur when they come upon a dead thing, a dead animal, a dead human, is there a big difference when you have a death like we're talking about today, where the term disembowel has been used? Is that a different smell than that of rotting flesh or a combination of things going on?

After a period of time, it's going to blend together. However, there is that moment in time, I would think, that with the bowels outside of the body, and not to mention, Dave, I can't just kind of gloss over this, but if this man was in fact disemboweled, and we've got other injuries we're going to talk about as well, there's going to be a copious amount of blood that will have issued forth from his body. Now, even in the case, I know what people are saying. Well, what if he was dead after it happened? If with this level of trauma that they are at least intimating, you know, occurred, you're going to have puddles. Puddles are different than pools to me. That's kind of my own view of it.

You're going to have puddles of blood that will, you know, kind of surround the body. You can have pooled blood. And maybe, you know, other people's, you know, understanding of volume of blood that's been let might be different. But I've always envisioned, you know, puddles of blood and you're stomping through rain puddles. And you'll have a copious amount of blood there on the surfaces. And that's going to have a smell. You combine that with the bowels that have now been released from the abdomen, that will have a particular smell. And additionally, he's been down for a while. Now, what you're going to be looking at here is that anytime you have a body

that is severely traumatized like this, you are sending out a signal for every insect that is roundabout and flies will almost immediately show up. Okay. So that process of, you know, that putrefaction is going to accelerate. Now, putrefaction, as I teach, is different than autolysis. Autolysis is kind of an internal breaking down, but something that's putrefied has got internal and external forces working on it. And so you're going to have a lot of flies that will light. And you say, well, my house is perfectly sealed.

I never see a fly in my house. Let me tell you something. Where there's a will, there's a way. I've found for flies, They will get in there. I've actually handled cases, Dave, of people that have died in the summertime where I found fly eggs have been laid on the body within three hours of death. And I'm talking about in the eyes and the nostrils. They seek out moist, dark areas to lay these eggs. And so, again, with the fly activity, that's only going to further this.

So when they walk through the door, and this is not something new to them, to the police officers, I can assure you. You know, El Paso is a relatively nice-sized place. They will have been out on decomps before. And it's going to hit their senses like nobody's business. And they're going to smell it. The son, who in this case is the finder, I believe, correct, Dave? Correct. When he shows up at Dad's domicile here,

how assaulting this is for a child to discover their parents like this. And it's going to be a smell more than likely unless he works in or around our field is going to be all the more assaulting to him. And it's a horrible proposition because I can only imagine this, this young man whose father has passed away. He knows that he had been having conversations with his dad. And then all of a sudden you wonder if those conversations began to flood back into his memory. And then he's got this associated smell that's emanating from the home. And he hasn't yet found his dad's body because the smell will assault you way before what you see assaults you.

It will be as soon as he opens the door. Sometimes you can smell it outside of the house. I've had that happen on many occasions where I could smell rotting flesh from within the home before I ever opened the door. And Katie barred the door when you do open it because it slams you in the face. So he, this poor child, this man, has really borne witness both in the smell sense and the visual sense to something that he probably wouldn't count on, Dave. And that's where I was looking back to that initial call from dad saying, Hey, your brother's not acting right. He's acting, you know, strange. He's acting weird again.

When, when the son gets there to check on his dad, he realizes that things are not just not good because of the smell tells him, I, I, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he knew death was right around the corner before he ever set foot in the house because the it's emanating from inside the house. And by the way, Joe, it had to have been going on for a couple of days. Right. I mean, this is not something that is going to just happen. And poof, you can, you know, tell there's a dead body inside. This is something that's been going on for a couple of days. All right. Now, when he gets in, we know that his father is dead.

We know that Victor Sr. is dead from, well, we've talked about disembowel, but he's got other injuries going on, too. How are these other injuries going to impact his body? Does your body deteriorate faster when you have more injuries? Yeah. Yeah. I think that it does. And, um, there's evidence that it does because anytime you, it's almost, it's almost like a ship, you know, if you, if you, um, insult the, uh, structural integrity of a ship, it compromises, uh, everything that's contained within the ship. Okay. So, um, if you think of our bodies as a vessel and they're referred to as vessels, uh, in many texts, uh, throughout the, uh, throughout the world.

Every time there is an insult to any area of the body, particularly where it's left a, you know, a gash or slit or a stab wound or bullet hole or, you know, a large opening in the body would be associated with disembowelment. For every insult to the body, I believe that you are increasing the rate at which that body is going to decompose because you violated structural integrity of the body. So it's going to break down quicker. Those spaces that are normally protected in life are now open to an increased rate of decomposition. It's also open to the external elements, particularly heat in that environment. And it's also going to be exposed to any kind of insect activity. And if it's outdoors and you have animals about that would be so inclined to go after the dead, you've increased that factor as well.

So, yeah, in answer to your question, yeah, I believe that it does impact the rate at which bodies decompose. But these injuries that this poor man sustained, just so we understand, Mr. Contreras, Victor, there's evidence that not only was he disemboweled, you've got blood deposition all over the house, which you would expect. That means that probably something happened in life. Unless it's transfer blood, it comes off a perpetrator and they're touching the wall or touching some other surface. You've also got what they have identified as stab wounds. So we know from Jump Street that we've got, as if we needed any further confirmation, we've got sharp force injuries to the body. And he's also got something else that's kind of interesting here, Dave. They're kind of being nonspecific, but I can probably guess what

this is. They're talking about a severe head injury or head injuries. They're not saying cuts. And that takes us down a completely different road. And, oh, yeah, by the way, he's had his throat cut. So you've got this myriad of injuries that have occurred. One of the problems that the pathologist is going to be faced with, because the police are going to ask this question, and here is the classic question that we always get asked, you know, what sequence did these occur in?

So how did this come about? At what stage did this come about? And we've talked about before on body bags. Was it anti-mortem, perimortem or post-mortem? Only an autopsy can actually tell. so just so that we can revisit you've got a father who in life had contacted his other son and stated that he made mention to his son who turns out to be the finder of victor's body says your brother's acting crazy again. Is that, is that pretty, is that an accurate quote, Dave? As something that goes along with the, hey, your son, your brother, Jamie, is acting crazy

again. That's what Victor Sr. told Victor Jr. And that made me look back at a few things, Joe, because my first thought was, if dad is calling the son and saying, hey, he's acting crazy again, that's a fearful thing to say that to a son. It's asking for help without asking for help. It's saying, I got a problem I can't deal with here. Well, I looked it up. Sure enough, police have been called before because before this happened, police showed up because Jamie Contreras, the son, actually took a hammer to his father and hit his father in the head with a hammer a couple of times prior to this.

And police showed up for that one. And that's where the call, your brother's acting crazy again, came from, because there was the prior attack, I believe. So when you start looking at this, one of the things I noticed, Joe, is first of all, when when Victor Junior gets there and he smells death, you know, through a window, he's outside when he comes in the house and he sees what is obviously a body on the floor and it's covered in a very, very bloody sheet. And he says that when he took the sheet off, the body was very bloated. Yeah.

And which that indicates a number of things to you as an investigator that probably passed by people like me. We just kind of assume we see a dog on the side of the road, they bloat, but it's got to mean a whole lot more when it's a human being inside of a home as you try to determine, you know, how long he's been there. But there was there were wounds to his head. I'm thinking that those were caused probably by a hammer. I got nothing to go on except that he had beat him with a hammer before.

And I'm thinking whenever we've done a story about somebody getting hit with a hammer, it's in their head. Yeah, it is. And that's, you know, that's where you're going to attack. That's where I think most assailants would attack someone with a hammer. I mean, you know, you can take, and I've seen, I've seen strikes on the torso before, but you know, you got to keep in mind that with hammer attacks, just about any kind of blunt force attack, um, they're going to be very frenzied. Uh, they're not real well ordered. Um, but the goal is because if you're wielding a hammer against someone, um, your ultimate goal is to kill them. Okay. And so with these hammer strikes, what you're going to see are going to be these. That is, okay, there's a couple of things that we have to throw in here.

If each one of these hammer strikes, the hammer is oriented in the manner in which we commonly think of a hammer, where you've got the business end of the hammer that's driving a nail. Okay, if it's perfectly oriented like that, then you're going to get an interesting little laceration sometimes that might have a curve to it that may or may not marry up with the blunt edge of a hammer. If the hammer is textured in any way, that surface, like if it's got kind of a herringbone texture to it, I don't know if I'm saying that right, kind of crisscross, some of it will be, that will actually imprint itself on the skin as an overlying abrasion contusion. Abrasion and contusion are two different things. So you'll have that top layer of skin that's erupted as a result of an abrasion.

Think about skin, knee, skin to elbow. And then that hemorrhage that kind of eccentrically goes out from that central strike point where the little vessels have been erupted and it's bleeding out. Those areas are bleeding out in interstitial tissue. The question is how many times was he struck and what was the level of lethality? Because just because somebody gets hit in the head with a hammer doesn't necessarily mean that they're dead or that they're going to die. Now, I can tell you there's high probability you're going to do some serious injury. And so you're not, that's not going to be revealed until

you can actually take back the scalp and you look at the underlying external table of the skull. And there's some images that I've used in classes over the years where, you know, you'll have a, depending upon the size of the hammer, the business end, as I like to refer to it, because I don't like a quarter size, like the currency quarter, 25 cents, um, size strikes, strike points. And you'll actually see a ring. I hate to say ring fracture because that's a specific fracture that happens at the base of skull, but it has a circular appearance. Let's just say that. And it drives that bit of skull, if it detaches completely, into the dura matter, which covers the brain. And if you hit hard enough, it'll actually go into the brain.

So if you get multiple of these strikes where you've got that kind of intrusion into the cranial vault, yeah, there's high probability somebody's going to die. But Dave, I'm fascinated by the fact that he struck multiple times with a hammer, but you still feel the need. Not you, universal you, or I guess the son suspect you. You still feel the need to take an edged weapon and cut your father's throat. That's kind of, is it overkill? Yeah, I mean, to me it is, but why do you need to go that far? Well, Joe, there's something else in this that I wanted to ask you about regarding the fact that blood spatter was throughout the house. And in my head, I'm thinking you got the front door lock, back door lock. The only window that's open is the bedroom window. And that's where the father's body is found in his bedroom. But blood spatter around the house. All I'm thinking is that the father is trying to get

away from the son who is allegedly attacking him. I'm thinking there's a hammer involved in your right. He's got him. He's chasing him. but you've got blood spatter, which means something's being swung, right? I mean, it's got to be cast off. Is that's what I think about blood spatter. It can be, it can be cast off, but again, you have to kind of couch your terms here a little bit. I lean more to being conservative with you. This is called knowing just enough to be really wrong, see? No, you will. Okay, just imagine. I always like to use the paintbrush description.

And that's what I'm picturing from the hammer. Yeah, and so every time you, now the first strike that you have with the hammer is not going to generate blood, more than likely. So when the head is struck, you've got a couple of layers you have to go through. First off, you got to go through the scalp. Well, hair and scalp. Okay. Do you know hair thickness can affect this as well. So if you strike a guy with really thick hair or one really thick hair, as opposed to a bald person, the hair can actually cushion, okay, to a certain degree. And people don't think about that, but it can.

You got that dynamic working. But let's just say it's sufficient enough to strike down, you hit that first surface, you've compromised the structural integrity. My contention has always been that you have to strike again in order to kind of put blood onto that surface. That when we talk about cast off, you're drawing the hammer back over the top of your head, like you're flinging something over your shoulder and you kind of are, and you'll get this kind of arcing deposition on the walls and that sort of thing. Also, if he's swinging, if he's swinging, not in the vertical plane, but in the horizontal, horizontal plane, say he strikes down side of the head and then draws it back sideways so that you're in the horizontal plane, then you're throwing blood on the wall to the side. It's not always going to be over the head. I think some people think that all cast off is over the top of the head, over the shoulder. It can be. And most of the time,

that's what happens. But if somebody, these things are very dynamic. It's not, these things don't occur in a vacuum. Okay. So you have to be real careful about the interpretation of blood deposition and thinking about that. And then he has had I don't know maybe a moment of lucidity at some point in time where he he looks down his hands and you know he's touched the surface father's body and it's got blood all over it and then he proceeds to touch the wall then then that's transfer blood that you have. So if the instrument that you're utilizing has got blood on it, that blood is going to drip down off of the head of the hammer, down onto the handle of the hammer, and it'll transfer onto

your hands. And so, you know, if he touches the wall with that if he's got blood on his clothing and he bumps into the wall that's going to transfer over so it's really important to try to categorize this this blood deposition that you're talking about okay let me ask you this joe because we talked about the neck being uh sliced his neck. Yeah. All right. I hate to reference everything to a television show or a movie. No, no, that's okay. In the TV show Breaking Bad, the chicken guy, he actually, there's a scene in it where he actually cuts the neck, uses a box cutter to slice the neck open of one of Victor. Actually, the guy's name was Victor.

And I think and when he does that, he holds him and blood squirts out of his neck. OK, it's the blood is squirting. Is that going to happen when you slice someone's neck or does it have to be sliced in a perfect way or is that just a movie TV thing? No, it's not just simply a movie TV thing because what they're demonstrating there is this kind of arterial spray, they refer to it as, and the pressure that's built up. The question is, I think that because arterial deposition of blood has got a very distinct appearance to it. It's not high-velocity blood deposition like you see when someone is shot because the blood becomes almost a histamine. I tell my students, if you want to know what high-velocity blood deposition looks like, go home, get an aerosol can of hairspray and just pump it one time onto

your mirror and you'll see kind of what that looks like. It's very particulate and tiny. With arterial spray in this term in this case if you're thinking about a carotid that has been sliced then the heart is still beating and what's fascinating i've always been fascinated by these people that do the blood interpretation, is that as the heart beats and blood is pouring out of or being ejected out of an artery, they can see, and this is pretty fascinating, they can see with every contraction of the heart. Isn't that fascinating? Because the blood itself actually presents in a manner in which you can see where every single time the heart beats and it sprays the blood in that direction.

Boom, boom, boom. That's how they come up with these interpretations, which is absolutely fascinating to me that they can do this. And, you know, and of course there's all these other things that they do, uh, you know, where they can track somebody's movement. Uh, and I'm not talking about a perpetrator that though that does exist. I'm talking about somebody that is initially injured in one part of the house and they egress through the house where maybe they're touching a wall. And I've actually seen blood deposition on a wall, Dave, where it starts off at the highest point and it travels downward diagonally as a person is losing their will or their ability to thrive. Goes down the wall, all the way down the hallway.

I'll never forget a case that I had like that until they're dead at the end of the hallway. And you can actually kind of map that by these blood depositions on the wall. And it can come in any number of forms. You've got this passive dripping that happens that, you know, famously we've talked about this with Ellen Greenberg with the blood flowing out of her mouth where gravity is pulling it down. So you get one large droplet of blood and you'll see gravity begin to pull that blood downward. Okay. you'll see gravity begin to pull that blood downward.

Or you can have a smear, which might be a transfer. So there's any number of depositions that are out there relative to the blood that are going to tell you a lot about what happened. I'm interested in the end of life for Victor because he's found, somebody took the time. To put a sheet over him. But there's a lot of activity that took place before that sheet ever got on the body day. There is. And Joe, you know, I was doing a little research on this and found out about the hammer attack and how the father was concerned

enough about previous activities by the suspect here, his son, Jamie. Um, one thing that had come out is that apparently Jamie had killed Victor's pets, his father's pets. Now they, they made it plural in reporting, but didn't exactly tell us whether it was cats, dogs, rabbits, birds. I don't know what it was, but he was killing them. And as we look at a man who would say that the reason, you know, when when police did catch up with Jamie Contreras, he told them, they said, hey, where's your where's your dad? And he said, he's in heaven. And he explained how the aliens had taken over and they took his bowels or what have you. I mean, whatever crazy explanation the guy came up with. But he had this the same guy, Jamie Contreras, had walked through his neighborhood a couple of years ago carrying a decapitated rabbit. So I guess my thing here, Joe, is when you've got a guy who's 39 years old and two years ago, you see him walking through the neighborhood carrying a decapitated rabbit.

How is he still walking around outside of a hospital or jail i have no idea i really don't if i saw that right now joe i'd be on the phone with you saying please call somebody i i mean i would freak out if somebody was walking i live in a neighborhood you you've seen my neighborhood if i saw somebody walking down the hill in front of my house carrying a bunny rabbit and the head was chopped off and they were walking like no big deal i'm freaking out yeah we've got a problem at that point in time and in answer to your question i you know i we could talk for days about you know mental health in our country and the way the mental mentally ill are dealt with um and you know we don't know a lot about his background relative to what kind of psychopathology,

you know, he may have, have had, but if he just on the surface and play junior psychiatrist here for a second, just on the surface, if you believe that you've had communications with extraterrestrials, you know, this sounds like he's in a delusional state, you know, I don't know, maybe he's in a delusional state you know i don't know maybe he's got schizophrenia or something like that i've actually worked a case and i've mentioned this before with a young man that took his own life and he didn't intend to um but he he did and that's because he thought cia had put a microphone in his forearm and he cut his arm open. I think we, over 30 times he cut his arm. Bless his heart. Yeah, I know. And he lived with his parents and he was looking for the microphone that was in his forearm. Okay. So I don't, you know, I'm not

saying that, I'm not saying that he should not be held responsible for what he has done for, to his father. He, he bloody well should. But the problem is you don't know what his perception of reality is. You know, if he's, and again, we go back to this idea of he's killing animals, um, you know, kind of, you know, you kind of got a sign there that there's real underlying, you know, kind of a threat of violence that's resting here. And here's another thing that's kind of interesting. If he has got a history, he might not just perhaps be killing anybody else's animals. And if he has, whatever the sharp instrument that he has chosen to use in this case, was this instrument actually used to kill any animals with?

And this is, from a forensic standpoint, this is kind of fascinating. Because, you know, I think any of us can walk around and we can say, Hey, you know, you look down at a red substance that's, you know, on a knife blade or laid on, or, uh, that's deposited on the floor and you say, Hey, that's blood. That's all finally good for you and I to have that conversation and say, yeah, that's blood. Um, doesn't work in court because you have to, when you're processing these scenes, there's a whole series of testing that has to go on. First off, you have to do a test that says if this is or is not blood. Okay. You go from that level to is this animal or human blood?

And then you get into typing, you know, where, you know, the old serology model where you're trying to type the blood, and then that spins off into DNA, but you have to establish first an instrument might have blood on it, but wouldn't it be fascinating to learn in this case if they tested this knife blade and they found remnants of not just Mr. Contreras' blood on there, but maybe an older sample that's on there that turns out to be a cat or rabbit, a dog. You never know if that's the instrumentality that he prefers because he's obviously got an affinity for sharp weapons. And, you know, we haven't even, you know, talked about the disembowelment to

take place, which by the way, we've talked about this with dismemberment, but if you don't have the tools to facilitate disembowelment, it's not an easy process. I think people think that it, that- Not just slicing the belly open and everything comes gushing out right yeah it's not like uh um i don't know i can't remember the japanese term it's not harry carry but it's that's what i was gonna say a seppuku or i can't remember the kind of ritualized form um it doesn't and that's highly ritualized uh with very sharp instruments uh where there's a specific process that takes place with that with disembowelment. And, you know, if you're going to use a household instrument, first off, it'd have to be very sharp and you'd have to have certain tolerances built into your own psyche that would allow you to do that, to hover over your dad's body and literally split him wide

open. And, you know, they, they didn't just talk about Dave in this case, that this was a disembowelment case. They mentioned organs as well. So I wonder what was found in and out of the body. If anything had been removed was was were all of the organs accounted for? Had they been taken off somewhere? I don't know. I don't know. And that's that's what is kind of fascinating about this case. You were actually right about the term sepuku, sepuku, S-E-P-P-U-K-U.

And it also goes with Harry Carey, self-disembowelment. OK. I remember that from, uh, Terawa, uh, but it, World War II stuff. Yeah. Yeah. The thing is here, Joe, is when we're dealing with a case where there's a thought that maybe mental illness has come, uh, come into play where there is a, uh, I don't want to say every violent act that goes far, you know, to, you know, cutting people up and things like that isn't crazy. But to a normal to what we consider normal, I mean, it just seems like way out there. But can you when you're walking a scene, can you actually see a difference in the mental state of the person committing the act? Is there a frenzied, out of control thing that you can find in the evidence? Or can you not separate anger from crazy pain from fear?

No, I know what you're saying. I think that if somebody is, let's see, how can I term this? If somebody has psychopathology going on, okay, like where they have voices that are telling them perhaps that your dad has been inhabited by extraterrestrial life. then it might become more methodical as opposed to some person that comes home and finds their spouse in bed with another person and they pick up a hammer or a knife and they proceed to kill both people. And that's going to be a very frenzy, disordered event. And again, you know, when profilers look at these sorts of things, I find it fascinating as well that he's been killing animals and we know what that's associated with many times as a lead up. You know, I think that that's something that they would certainly consider. And, you know,

there can be, and don't misconstrue what I'm saying here, there can be, I think with the mentally ill, there can almost be a, a, a ritualized form of this. And I'm not talking about like a ritualized killing per se, but if, if you're listening to an outside voice or what you perceive to be an outside voice, and they're giving you instructions, you put this here, you know, you, I don't know, you remove this organ and you put it up on the shelf. You remove this organ, you put it there. You need to take this organ and put it in the refrigerator because that's the key organ. You have to keep it isolated from everything else.

Whatever the voice is telling them to do, that's what's directing them at that point in time. Now, if you've got somebody that does have mental illness and they feel as though they're being attacked, then yeah, I would imagine it could leech over into this idea that it's frenzied. But Dave, he actually admitted, correct me if I'm wrong, that he was being told something that kind of initiated this whole thing thing or he was making a statement. Wasn't he? Didn't he say something? Yeah, it was his belief that aliens had taken over, that his father was gone, that his father

was no longer there. The person he was looking at was not his father. It was an alien. And actually, you know what? I think at this point there have been a number of different things said and or written about this case. It's still fairly new. This is an ongoing issue right now as they try to separate. This began with having heard from my dad in a while, you know, that typical call where the son comes to check on his father and it turns into this big bag of what in the heck are we dealing with? Are we dealing with somebody who really has checked out from life mentally and is seeing things and hearing things?

Does he truly believe that aliens have disemboweled his father and taken over his body? I mean, I don't know what's going on in the guy's psyche or anything else, but I do know this, Joe. If you were going to walk in on that crime scene, which it is a crime scene, regardless of whether the guy is in control of himself. But you're going to have to just you're not going to hear the stories. You're not going to the story of aliens and that doesn't impact you until after the fact when you're writing a book, because you're going to look at this and tell me what happened based on the evidence. Yeah. And it will be in, in those in the morgue as well. You know, when, and look, I'd, I'd be lying if I said that, you know, pathologists are

not filled in on, on what they've, uh, what the police have heard out on the scene. They're going to know that. Okay. Um, you know, at this point, you know, when he rolls in to the morgue decomposed, by the way, they're only going to have the snatches and hints at things. Like for instance, if this guy has been walking around the neighborhood with decapitated animal bodies, he, first off, he's going to be known to the local beat unit. If they've been called out on domestics there, that information would actually come to the cops at the scene because what the cops are going to do, or the detectives who are cops,

but you had detectives at the scene, they will ask the shift supervisor, okay, which might be a lieutenant or a sergeant, and say, hey, have you guys had contact at this house before? And the sergeant, particularly in a case like, I can only imagine a case like this, the sergeant's going to say, what? We felt like we need to sit up outside the house out here because we were always getting called here. Have you ever had contact with any people in the house? Yeah. We've talked to the old man because he told us that he was afraid of his son.

Or we have taken the son aside and said, look, you got to cool it out, man. You know, you can't behave this way. Or maybe they've taken the kid in for observation. Again, dollars to donuts, I bet you this kid has gone in, probably in the back of a police car or an ambulance, and taken in for observation at some point in time. Most of the time, this kind of thing just doesn't, you know, just materialize out of nothing. You know, you're going to have history. And in this case where you've got a young man who has reportedly been saying, as he is related to the police, that he wanted the aliens to give me my power as he struck his dad down. We're going to keep our eye on this case and know that more will probably develop. We'll find out what happens here to the son. Has he been taken in for an evaluation? Is he going to be placed into an area where he can perhaps get help, get medicated, get him in a position where maybe he can stand trial at some point in time

because this is a horrific homicide and somebody has to be held responsible. But we do know this. This man, who obviously loves his children, has died at the hand of his own son and was left to decompose in the home where he welcomed them on a regular basis. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.